Political Scene: The Democracy of Gun Control

During a week of unspeakable violence in Boston, the U.S. Senate blocked moderate steps toward tighter gun control. Apparently, last year’s mass shooting in Newtown, Connecticut, was not impetus enough. What’s more, Hendrik Hertzberg asks on this week’s Political Scene podcast, “How can something that has the support of ninety per cent of the American people not pass?” Hertzberg joins host Dorothy Wickenden and John Cassidy to discuss gun control and what it’s defeat says about the state of American governance. “What it was a big defeat for,” Hertzberg explains, “is the idea of democracy itself.”

Cassidy, though, takes a longer, and more optimistic, view of the situation. “I think the fact that it’s so outrageous may be a sort of positive sign in some ways,” he says. “The only way that things are going to get fixed is if people get so outraged that they actually start to do something about it. One thing we know about Washington—it’s terribly broken—it is ultimately still amenable to popular action.” Is this a moment in which the N.R.A. and the Republicans have gone too far?